Back from the dead – the English country house

Even with an asking price of £35 million, there will be no shortage of buyers for Cliveden, the Buckinghamshire palazzo that went on the market last week. The hotel is up for sale after its owner went into administration – but even if another hotel group doesn’t go for it, there are plenty of billionaires, even in these straitened times, who’d be delighted to snap up one of the great stately homes of England.

How things have changed for the country house. Half a century ago, the institution looked in terminal decline: between 1945 and 1974, 250 were demolished. As Evelyn Waugh said later of Brideshead Revisited, written in 1945, “it seemed then that the ancestral seats which were our chief national artistic achievement were doomed to decay and spoliation like the monasteries in the 16th century.”

Yet today, our country houses are in rude health, swamped by a flood of international cash. And it is not just foreigners who appreciate their rare, fragile beauty: the National Trust, which looks after many of them, is the biggest heritage charity in the world, with 3.7 million members. And on screen, the stately homes just keep on coming: Gosford Park, followed by a film version of Brideshead Revisited, a revival of Upstairs, Downstairs and, of course, Downton Abbey.

But what is it that makes English country houses so special, and so distinctive? The roots lie in the Reformation. Before the 1530s, the church was a far more substantial builder than the monarch or the aristocracy: 99 per cent of surviving pre-Reformation buildings are churches, cathedrals or monasteries; 0.9 per cent are castles; and domestic buildings account for only 0.1 per cent. That’s why Dartington Hall in Devon – where the Telegraph is holding its Ways with Words book festival this week (see www.wayswithwords.co.uk) – is such a rare treasure: a late 14th-century hall, with vaulted porch, dais, screens passage and fireplace, that is among the grandest secular medieval buildings in the country.

After the Reformation, the collapse of church power led to the first generation of remarkable English country houses: the late 16th-century “prodigy houses”, including Burghley, Longleat and Hardwick, often built by courtiers to accommodate Queen Elizabeth I. The length and security of the Virgin Queen’s reign meant that defensive castles were no longer needed. Tudor fortunes were spent on state apartments, long galleries and formal gardens, rather than arrow slits.

Many of these houses are still lived in by the descendants of the people who built them – which is no coincidence. The size and longevity of the English country house are underpinned by enormous landholdings (often expropriated from those pre-Reformation monasteries).

These largely rural estates explain the importance of the “country” bit of country houses. While French nobles gathered around the Paris court, country estates remained at the heart of the English aristocracy. Grand families in France usually sold the chateau, and hung on to the hôtel particulier in Paris. When their English equivalents downsized, they demolished their London piles rather than sell their country houses. If Sebastian Flyte’s family had held on to their London house and sold their country one, Evelyn Waugh’s novel would have been called Marchmain Revisited. But it was the city pile – Marchmain House – that the Flytes sold when the cash started running out.

Many of those post-Reformation landholdings survive almost intact – indeed, a third of Britain’s land is still owned by aristocrats and rural gentry. The Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry – the eighth biggest landowner in the country, with 240,000 acres – retains four country houses in Scotland and Northamptonshire. He can also afford to maintain the contents, not least Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna of the Yarnwinder, the £30 million picture stolen from Drumlanrig in 2003 and recovered in 2007.

Thanks to primogeniture, British country houses have remained treasure chests, while those on the Continent have been ransacked not just by revolution, but by partible inheritance: with every new generation, there’s been another division of the spoils. Equipped with bottomless fortunes – and the leisure to go on year-long Grand Tours – British aristocrats took their pick from European art collections and covered their walls back home with Rembrandts, Titians and Poussins. Our architects, too, scoured the Continent for ideas. Inigo Jones was the first, taking two trips to Italy, in 1603 and 1614, to absorb ancient and Renaissance influences.

Jones – and most subsequent British architects – borrowed heavily from these hallowed sources. But they went beyond imitation, to create original interpretations of the classical language of architecture. Too often in this country, we suffer from an architectural cultural cringe, a feeling that we are the dull country cousins of ancient Rome and Greece, of Renaissance Italy. Yet from Jones to Wren, via the wilder baroque reaches of Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor, and on into Palladianism, neo-classicism and the Greek Revival, the British country house kept reinventing itself.

The Gothic country house was, if anything, more original, bordering occasionally on the lunatic. The locus classicus is James Wyatt’s Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire, built in 1807 for William Beckford – the bisexual MP, taught by Mozart, who wrote the first Gothic novel and retained the services of a personal dwarf. Fonthill, built with the millions from Beckford’s Jamaican sugar plantations, was a mammoth Gothic palace, centred around a 315-foot tower, on an octagonal design inspired by Ely Cathedral. The tower was so broad that a coach and six could be comfortably driven within its inner walls – that is, until the tower collapsed, in 1825.

Cliveden itself, built in 1851 by Charles Barry, is a good late example of the British capacity for the absorption and recasting of foreign influence. Inspired on the outside by the Cinquecento villas of Genoa, inside it’s a glorious ragbag, including a Louis XIII library and a Rococo boudoir, nestling alongside Jacobean panelling in Nancy Astor’s old bedroom.

Whoever buys it won’t just be buying an English country house. They’ll also get what lies behind the best of English country houses – two and a half thousand years’ worth of European and domestic architectural influences.